441–450 of 783 posts
Edit: Found my answer in this blog post of yours https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/
The article really resonated with me, as it's eerily similar to my own experience at Microsoft a couple of years back. Constant reorgs, resulting in projects being cancelled, resulting in lack of motivation, as months of your hard work are thrown out due to unclear decisions by the management. I too was hoping for a senior level promotion. The last project I worked on, I was the only non-senior level developer in a t…
To be sure I'm not downplaying your commentary. It's extremely illuminative and very well written. After almost 20 years in the industry I've learned the burning truth of it all, though. Loyalty to individuals is worthwhile. Loyalty to companies is meaningless. Be earnest and caring in your interactions with individual coworkers but feel nothing as you squeeze every drop you can out of the company because that's exactly what they're trying to do to you.
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I obviously don't work for Google - so an outsider's opinion: - Expanding on op here, senior software engineer isn't one who is doing more junior work: It is pretty much a different job profile. You are making higher order decisions. - Promotions come with a lot of timing as well: Honestly talent evens out after a bit and luck/timing/inter-personal skills tend to take over. I have seen excellent code bases that nobod…
> This leads to a ton of actual problems too: You get a person really really good at coding / execution but shit in big picture thinking / broad system design choices / cross team work etc. spend a bunch of time in a level. Now you have to either promote him into a spot where s/he will fail OR lose em to attrition. Either choice tends to break. I hate this issue, and see it occur in so many companies. Why are we so o…
“OK So I guess I need to leave.”
“Why oh why can’t we retain our talent????”
So ridiculous. You need an IC career track that is rewarding and achievable.
1: yes, they actually pointed to a physical book that described some industry standard of what software engineers must be paid.
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A new repo, likely a new employee on a new project. I have to disagree with your statement since you don't know the context at all. If all they're given is a repo with inadequate instructions, there's not much more you can do than keep asking for general help. Comment sounds like typical 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps', meant to put down new talent, ignoring that complex, modern dev environments have many parts…
> I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing. That is not asking for help. Asking for help would be "Can somebody please help me? ... rest of message here...". Even better is asking an individual (or individuals) directly.
Say what now? Mentioning you are blocked, in a stand-up, multiple times is a cry for help. What is the point of having stand-ups if you're not assisting blocked team members?
Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke. They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true or a lie.
The way promotion works at Google is actually a direct consequence of their desire to "empower" the engineers and keep managers in a rather passive, supervisory role. The assumption behind it (completely misguided IMO) is that engineers will "figure it out" on their own and "handle things among themselves" just fine.
The big problem with this is that it strongly incentivizes the kind of anti-social behavior that's normally associated with Wall Street: dishonesty, short-term thinking, greed, narcissism.
To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities.
That's exactly right. Manipulating your coworkers to your own advantage is the fastest route to promotion at Google. Lying about your contribution to things would be the runner-up. This is simply because there's a lack of authorities who could see, recognize and penalize such behavior.
I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things.
I know I may be the exception but I actually value having a boss who's got things under control and looks after the team, as opposed to a lord-of-the-flies type situation where the promotion goes to the biggest liars and manipulators.
Source: I worked at Google as a SWE
> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…
As a former manager, the closest I came was making a point to observe who was helping who within the team. And following up by asking people during their 1 on 1s if they felt anyone was being especially helpful to them, explained things well or not, etc.
People who helped their teammates very much got a boost in their prestige in my view, and that was good for additional job security or additional pay. If they struggled with a couple tasks, but had helped some teammates when they DID understand what to do, that very much increased my willingness to help them or give them extra time to figure things out.
This question may be an odd one, but how did you create the little cartoons in your blog post? I feel like they really improved my experience as a reader, and if I were to create content in the future I wouldn't mind knowing if there was an easy way to include something similar for someone with little to no artistic skill. Edit: Found my answer in this blog post of yours https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/
> Illustrations by Loraine Yow
which links to https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-ology/
I wondered if anyone would have not read to the end of the article and, like we both did, assume that the author had created the cartoons.
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> Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off I disagree. There is a whole category of people who want high reward for their efforts. There exists no way to get high rewards or royalties outside of starting your own venture. The downside is the risk of course. I do agree that you shouldn't be angry, but there are so many new ways to exist and survive these days.
I suppose that depends on what you categorise as 'high reward'. I basically mess around writing software—something I like doing—for 6 hours a day, attend a few meetings, and every month somebody deposits a ludicrous amount of money into my bank account. And I'm not even working for one of the larger companies with correspondingly better salaries. I'm certainly not going to become a cash millionaire off the back of it…
don't be so sure. invest 10-20% wisely and you may be one sooner than you think ;)
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That's not really undebuggable. Process Explorer shows registry calls, and IIRC even marks them in red when the key is missing. Again not arguing that this is efficient, just that doing nothing is less efficient.
I generally assume that when someone says "blocked" they're not literally staring out the window, they're just not operating with anywhere close to the efficiency they should be. Also it's not clear to me that learning how to use Process Explorer + using it, when that's not your job, is actually meaningfully more efficient than staring out the window all day.